The man returned the woman’s smile, though he powered it with somewhat less wattage. “Let’s hope so.”

The white-smocked duo vanished, and—

—Dax was suddenly in another room.

She recognized the young man lying on the medical theater’s operating table as an initiate being prepared for his first joining. A pair of physicians dressed in surgical tunics carefully lifted a symbiont toward not the initiate’s abdomen, but his waiting open mouth. The Kurlans’ experiments had led them to believe that symbiosis could be achieved more effectively by direct connection to a host’s brain stem.

Then Dax noticed that the symbiont looked…strange. Its overall vermiform shape was no different from that of any other symbiont she had ever seen, but the creature’s body was much paler. Small barbed feelers extended from its “head.” It would need those, Dax knew, to burrow its way gently through the back of the host’s throat…

Minutes later, the joining was done. The initiate sat up. He smiled. Then he opened his eyes.

The light of pain and madness burned there, and a long string of drool looped from his mouth. Something had clearly gone wrong with the symbiont’s new immune-system modifications…

Before Dax could recoil in horror, the scene changed once more. The memory vignettes to which one or more of the Annuated were treating her were now becoming briefer and more frequent, much as they had been during the earlier part of her mnemonic journey. And they were moving steadily forward in time, as though the elder symbiont had looked inside her, had anticipated her every question, and was deliberately trying to spin his memories into a coherent narrative in order to furnish the answers she sought.

Dax saw more labs, more researchers. Some were devoted to the continued enterprise of artificially enhancing the symbiont genome to make it more resistant to the disease. Others had the task of devising direct attacks on the virus whose extraordinarily high mutational rate was bringing continued devastation to Kurl’s symbionts. It even appeared that some of the symbionts’ genetic enhancements had accidentally crossed over to the virus, rendering it that much harder to kill.

The race against the virus continued for a decade or more. And the Kurlans were losing ground, their crash program to heal the symbionts leaving them diseased and insane instead. More disturbing still, the altered symbionts had begun taking control of their hosts, closing themselves off to the Kurlans’ long-term memories in order to dominate where once they had shared.

Dax once again found herself aboard a starship, watching the planet Kurl from low orbit. This time, however, the planet appeared anything but serene. Ugly plumes of brown-gray smoke rose in crooked columns on the day side. Fires raged at the edge of the southeastern continent, visible just beyond the darkness of the night-side terminator.

And this vessel carried people whose dark uniforms and serious bearing told her that the current mission did not involve establishing a new colony.

From a duty station on the port side of what could only be the bridge of a military vessel, Dax watched as a stern-faced middle-aged woman gave orders to a disciplined crew of six of her fellow Trills. From the way they carried themselves, she could tell immediately that most of them were joined.

“Have they launched any of their ships?” the captain asked.

A young male science officer responded crisply. “Not since we got here, Captain. However, some of them could have broken the planetary quarantine and gotten offworld before we arrived. There’s really no way to know for certain.”

Of course, Dax thought.The Kurlan memories I’ve been experiencing, or at least their echoes, had to have gotten off Kurl and back to Trill somehow.

The captain nodded grimly at the science officer. “How many are still alive down there?”

“Almost four million. All infected.”

Dax saw a light flash on her console. Though she couldn’t actually read the text on her display, she somehow understood its meaning. “Someone on the surface is hailing us, Captain. It’s coming from a high-level official address.”

“Put it on the screen,” said the captain.

The face that appeared on the central viewer was that of a fortyish Trill humanoid male. He was joined, no doubt, as was every adult on Kurl. But the creature that shared his existence had obviously been so greatly altered to resist the virus that it was clearly no longer fit for joining—at least not in the mutually beneficial manner that had always been the very essence of Trill symbiosis.

Dax, or rather the person whose memories she was experiencing, recognized him as the current Kurlan president. And she saw the same fires of madness that had illuminated the young initiate’s eyes in this man’s intense gaze.

Just like Jayvin, Dax thought. She no longer had any doubt that yet another of the neo-Purists’ assertions was true: the ancient Trill colony on Kurl was indeed the source of the parasites, or at least had spawned their remote ancestors.

“So you’ve finally come to kill the rest of us,” the man on the screen said, his eyes fixed upon the captain’s.

“You’ve already done a pretty thorough job of that yourselves,” the captain responded, apparently referring to the smoke and fires that were visible from orbit. “We’ve been sent to maintain the medical quarantine,” the captain continued. There was sympathy in her tone, but also cold, hard duranium. “By any means necessary.”

“You have failed to heal us. You have betrayed our symbiosis. You have forced us to take charge of it, rather than allowing you to inflict further harm upon us. You can no longer contain us. We have vessels ready to launch even now.”

“Contact them. Tell them they have to power down and remain on the surface.”

The president laughed, a hard, braying sound.“You do not command here.”

“Captain, I’m reading several vessels leaving the surface,” said the science officer, alarmed. “They all read as transluminal configurations.”

The captain turned and addressed Dax directly. “Private Memh, can you target all four of them simultaneously?”

Somehow, Dax knew that she could. Such things seemed to be Memh’s specialty. “Yes, Captain.”

Approximately two and a half minutes later, nothing remained of any of the other ships save orbiting fragments of superheated metallic debris.

And dozens of Kurlan Trill, both humanoids and symbionts, were dead. Dax felt physically ill, but remained at her—at Memh’s—post.

“They can still launch a lot more ships, Captain,” the science officer said, breaking the dolorous silence that had enveloped the control center. “We can’t possibly chase down every last one of them.”

“We might,” the captain said. She clearly did not like the direction the conversation was taking. Neither did Dax.

The science officer was almost in tears, but he held his ground admirably nevertheless. Like everyone else here, he was a creature of duty. “We can’t rely on that, Captain. The risk to Trill is too great.”

The captain settled back in her chair, staring straight ahead quietly. “You’re right, Mister Lev,” she finally said at length. “Womb help us all, you’re right.”

Turning her chair until she once again faced Dax, the captain said, “Private Memh, deploy the biogenics, along with the incendiaries.”

Dax was surprised at how little she hesitated after hearing that order. Memh must have anticipated the very real possibility of having to do this. Perhaps it had become second nature to her.